Net 'Paradigm Shift' for Slow-Moving Congress

Share

Net 'Paradigm Shift' for Slow-Moving Congress

Pathetic. Behind the times.

Those were some of the descriptions of Congress' online presence emerging from Friday's meeting of the Congressional Internet Caucus. But what the session's featured speaker called a "paradigm shift" in which more voters are using the Net to make up their minds about candidates and issues indicates that Congress, too, is moving into the digital age.

Dave Winston of the recently folded PoliticsNow site said that surveys of voters in last fall's presidential election showed as many as one in four used the Web to make up their mind about candidates or issues. That reality is likely to lead to a "fundamental paradigm shift" toward the use of the Internet as a political tool, Winston said.

But onlookers said that while a shift is certainly coming, things are moving slowly for now. Some see Congress' glacial movement towards digital reality as a function of the beast itself, some as a failure to grasp available tools and use them.

Congress is such a huge institution and is pulled in so many different directions that Capitol Hill will always be "one or many steps" behind the times, said Chris Casey of the Senate Democratic Communications office. And in areas in which it could move quickly - for instance, in realizing its own mandate to get important, timely documents online - Congress' performance has been "pathetic," said Gary Ruskin of the Congressional Accountability Project, a Washington-based think tank.

But Jonah Seiger, communications director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the rapid growth of the caucus and the growing realization that the Net is a tool for appeasing constituents and helping their re-election will speed up embrace of new interactive technology.

Some senators and House members are indeed flirting with political interactivity already.

Next week, Senator Conrad Burns, R-Montana, will conduct a Commerce Committee hearing on telecom access for rural and poor consumers that will field email questions from his home-state legislature. The exchange will be sent out over the panel's Web site. Within the next few months, Senator Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, will start conversing with constituents through a newsgroup devoted to state issues. Both Burns and Leahy are founding members of the caucus.